Issue #14: Workers ready to accept pay cuts to work remotely
There is little difference between generations
Headlines you shouldn’t miss
FINANCIAL TIMES Cutting pay for remote workers is a risky move: Google joined Facebook and Slack in adjustments of salary in accordance to workers’ location. If a Google worker works, e.g., from Connecticut, they shall receive 15% less salary as remuneration often has a lot to do with living prices in digital hubs like Silicon Valley and New York. Financial Times writer Sarah O’Conner argues that companies might risk maintaining and attracting talent by this move as different people get paid different salaries for the same work based on their residence.
WIRED Deepfakes Are Now Making Business Pitches: Consulting giant EY has started to apply deepfakes to business pitches. An AI-driven tool provided by British startup Synthesia is modeling realistic digital avatars of EY partners. In presentations, the digital avatars can speak foreign languages and act as a realistic clones of real humans. Such Artificial Reality Identities (ARI) require humans to be scanned for 40 minutes to enable realistic modeling.
WASHINGTON POST Facebook pushes VR for remote work but practicality, cost and nausea may stand in its way: Facebook has released the workplace app Horizon Workrooms, which allows workers to collaborate in a digital space via virtual reality (VR). The workers are supposed to wear the Oculus VR goggles to enter a digital workspace. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg believes that the 3D experience allows for better collaboration in remote work settings. Experts, however, doubt the quick implementation of VR apps: The technology is too expensive for many companies, and workers report several symptoms like nausea, fatigue, and headaches after using VR goggles.
FORTUNE Why this law firm only works on artificial intelligence: Washington-based law firm bnh.ai is working with AI-driven software. The leadership believes that machine learning can help lawyers solving complex legal issues. However, bias and hidden prejudice within the algorithms pose a threat to fair law consulting.
FORBES Will AI Make Coding Obsolete? AI entrepreneur Nisha Talagala explains currents trends in AI. New prototypes show that AI-driven software will be able to create apps and debug code. However, she believes that these advancements do not fundamentally threaten the jobs of IT developers, yet the nature of the tasks is going to change.
THE VERGE Elon Musk says Tesla is working on humanoid robots: During Tesla’s AI Day, founder Elon Musk announced that the company is working on a humanoid robot, which shall be designed to perform “tasks that are unsafe, repetitive or boring.” Musk believes that with robots like the Tesla bot, “in the future, physical work will be a choice.”
THE ATLANTIC Why Managers Fear a Remote-Work Future: While workers have embraced the opportunities remote work brings, some managers emphasize the importance of getting back to work in the office. The Atlantic writer Ed Zitron believes that unhealthy corporate cultures and a reluctance to accept change might be fuelling these sentiments among managers.
Graph of the week: Generations are willing to take pay cuts for remote work
A recent survey shows that across all generations, the majority of workers would accept a pay cut of 5% to work in a job that allows them to work remotely. Generation Z, the youngest cohort in the survey, was the least accepting.
Quote of the week: Arezou Soltani Panah on the effects of AI on social sciences
Arezou Soltani Panah, an Australian computer scientist, believes that the application of AI will reform tech and social sciences. She describes in a VentureBeat interview which possibilities she sees for AI-assisted social sciences and how the role of scholars might change:
Traditional social science is a territory mostly occupied with qualitative researchers and empirical scientists, and perhaps they’re less aware of the benefits of AI for their field. But the marriage between AI and social science has already been established and is evolving. Having said that, there is still a long way to go to customize AI solutions for social studies. For instance, esteem and personal recognition need has benefited from advancements in AI, where work around searching for, finding, and identifying information has been made easier through natural language processing (NLP) techniques such as sentiment analysis, stance detection, citation analysis, and so on and so forth. Additionally, historical data and long-term causal effects are in the center of attention for many social science projects, and using AI to answer casual questions is very complex.
Number of the week: 36% of remote workers report uncertainty about future work settings
According to a LinkedIn study conducted among 3.000 U.S. workers, over one third of remote workers are waiting for directions from their leadership regarding the future of their work environment. 36% of the workers working remotely report that they haven’t received a return-to-office plan yet.
The LinkedIn survey supports insights provided by McKinsey a few months earlier. A share of business leaders is not communicating which rules will apply to workers in the future, which leaves workers frustrated.
Tweet of the week: Boston Dynamics’ new robot rocking the parkour
You might wonder now why I curated a video of robots jumping around. Hear me out: Boston Dynamics is the company that developed the robot dog, which was used by the police in the United States. The Washington Post recently referred to it as the “dog of our dystopian dreams.”
While Boston Dynamics are doing an overwhelming job in developing cutting-edge robotics. It’s quite normal that people react with some fear towards robots that resemble animals or even humans. But that’s not what this is about. These robots are tools that can be applied to different cases. While nobody needs a robot that excels at parkours, industries will gladly take flexible robots, perform difficult motions and learn to navigate difficult terrain. There are plenty of dangerous jobs worldwide, especially in labor-intense industries like mining, construction, and production. Now, take a look at the new robot called Atlas and imagine what it could do as a tool to ease human lives.